The Challenge of Supreme Court Biography: The Case of Chief Justice Rehnquist

Abstract

In this review essay of John A. Jenkins’ The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist, I pursue three goals. First, I identify what is useful in The Partisan: information, some new, some helpful elaborations of what was already known, which helps us better understand Chief Justice Rehnquist, the private man and the public jurist. Second, I examine what Jenkins is trying to do in this book and where he runs into problems. The most obvious flaw of this biography is its relentless tendentiousness. The author clearly dislikes Rehnquist, and he uses the biography as a vehicle for an extended, largely unpersuasive, ad hominem attack on his subject. But Jenkins’ goal is not merely to criticize Rehnquist the jurist. It is to “unmask” Rehnquist, to conflate his personality and his judicial views and thereby reveal the core of the man. Jenkins, predictably, finds what he was looking for: a harsh, uncaring, and deeply conservative ideologue. But in the process he presents a version of Rehnquist that not only fails to align with certain known facts about the man, but also lacks the complex humanity of a fully drawn biographical subject. Finally, I argue that the problems that this particular book puts in high relief are in fact symptomatic of the genre of Supreme Court biography. My critique of this particular book thus provides a platform to consider the unique obstacles faced by any biographer of a Supreme Court Justice.

Keywords: Rehnquist, Chief Justice, biography, Supreme Court, legal history